Non-volatile memory systems, such as solid state drives (SSDs) including NAND flash memory, are commonly used in electronic systems ranging from consumer products to enterprise-level computer systems. The performance of lower density (fewer bit per cell) non-volatile memory is often better than that of higher density non-volatile memory in terms of endurance, but the space and cost advantage of higher density non-volatile memory often leads to SSDs including both types of memory. The greater endurance of lower density memory, such as single level cell (SLC) memory with a single bit per cell capacity, may suggest that initial host writes should be directed to SLC before later being written from the SLC to a multi-level cell (MLC) memory with multiple bit per cell capacity in a process referred to a folding. There are speed advantages, however, to directly writing host data to the MLC memory and avoiding the extra write step of first writing host data to SLC memory and then folding the data from several SLC blocks into a MLC block. The tradeoff, however, is that by skipping the typical path of a first write into SLC and then a fold from SLC into MLC, there is less write failure protection. An initial write into SLC before folding into MLC means that there is a temporary copy of the correct data in SLC if an error occurs in the SLC to MLC folding step. Although various forms of data protection encoding may be used to protect data from errors in a direct MLC write situation, there may be a performance cost due to the extra processing necessary to generate the error correction data.